The Devil You Don't Know
by antepathy
Summary: Barricade and Blackout meet the Jersey Devil. Sort of b-movie schlock. But with robots as the victims. :D


A/N For Spook_me prompt!

"Any luck this time?" Barricade's voice was sharp, the question coming before Blackout even finished his landing. Admittedly, he'd been crouched in his vehicle mode in the muddy cut off for hours now, pelted by cold rain, dripping under his armor. He looked every bit as miserable as a vehicle could look, as Blackout landed, his spinning-down rotors spitting new sluices of rain onto his hood and windshield.

"Got some data and some…human stuff. May be data about indigenous stuff." Blackout rolled open his cargo door, snapping his rotors back, out of the way as Barricade, with an aggrieved sigh—almost a groan—pushed up into his bipedal mode. Water slicked off Barricade's frame, spattering into his optics.

"Fraggin' indigenous data," Barricade muttered. "Know all I need to know about this slaggin' place: IT SUCKS." The light from Blackout's cargo bay spilled warm and dry and invitingly red into the deepening night.

Blackout snorted, twitching as Barricade reached for the box of stuff he'd stowed in his cargo hold. "So-some of the older data hadn't been digitized," Blackout said. "Project Iceman started before that."

"Fraggin' savages," Barricade said, without real surprise. Humanity sucked. He hated all of them. And their fraggin' weather. "And this fraggin' data stuff is not waterproof."

Blackout's turn to sigh. "You can, I guess…read it, uhhh, in me."

Barricade cocked his head. "Really?" It had been a bit of a…thing for him, ever since he'd realized that Blackout's Earth-scanned mode had such a large cargo area.

"Well, it makes sense."

And? It was kind of hot. Barricade didn't give Blackout a chance to retract the offer, scrambling inside the large cargo hold, letting his limbs drip dry. Spacious. Huh. And kind of warm. And vibrating softly from the copter's engines. "Pretty fraggin' nice in here," he said, his bad temper melting into a grin. "Snug, even."

Blackout hurmphed, embarrassed. "Just…I don't know. Look over the data or something."

Barricade smirked, hauling the plas crate over to him, digging inside. Old reports dated…fifty, sixty local orbital rotations ago? They wouldn't have been automated or digitized. So, savage stuff. And the ones labeled 'Top Secret' looked promising. Barricade settled himself against the cargo bay wall, wriggling his window wings. Oh yeah. Cozy. Snug.

He opened a folder with one damp talon, and began to read.

[***]

Barricade's laughter rang through the enclosed space. He'd sorted through the box of stuff, databursting the actual relevant parts to Blackout, and was now rifling through the…nonsense. What the frag had Blackout grabbed? Apparently anything his fat fingers could get a hold of.

"Seriously. 'The Witching Hour'? How do you think this is relevant?" Barricade held up the flimsy, battered comic book.

"I told you—indigenous research."

"Research," Barricade snorted. "Yeah, let's just hunt down this 'Camp Fear', right?"

"There's a Cape Fear a few hundred mechanometers from here?" Blackout suggested, helpfully.

Barricade snorted. "Sounds like a huuuuuge tourism draw. Probably where the bus on this thing is headed." He tapped the cover with one silver talon.

"Hey, have you ever seen one of those life forms? It looks like an animated endoskeleton!"

Barricade rolled his optics. "Yeah, probably a bad artist. Whatever." He flipped it open on his lap, snickering. "Is this supposed to be scary? Seriously?"

"What? What's going on?" The cargo cabin shifted around Barricade, Blackout trying to shift an optical sensor to see.

"Gimme a klik," Barricade flipped through the rest of the pages. "Right. Here's the SCARIEST STORY EVER!" He giggled. "So, we got this kid, Freddy—frag I think his name's the scariest part of this story—gets sent by some larger humans to this camp, where he's got to like…learn to beat stuff up. And then he chucks a bird nest down. And then he steals some kids…'stamp album'—frag, you'd think that saving the kid from terminal dorkdom would be a public service—and then kills everyone in an avalanche." He looked up. "That's…pretty much it. Except the end where no one believes him."

"Huh," Blackout said. "Sounds like he's going through Basic Training for Decepticons."

"Exactly," Barricade said. "Kind of a success story, really. Little squishy? You are now a Decepticon. Now go kill whoever named you 'Freddy'."

Blackout gave an amused rumble. "Hey, so…where did the endoskeleton come in?"

"Proving humans are crazy? Not at all. Seriously. Not one single walking skeleton in the whole fraggin' story."

"That's…wow."

"Yeah."

"I wanna go to this Camp Fear place," Blackout said. "Sounds like it could be fun."

"You just want to start an avalanche." Well, okay, so did Barricade, really. But. "We're not here for 'fun'."

"Yeah, well…what now?" Blackout grumbled. He was good at fighting. Not so good at waiting around. Not that Barricade was much better.

Barricade grunted. "We wait for orders. I guess."

A discontented sigh. "Boring."

Barricade shrugged, one of his shoulder tires rolling with the motion against the wall behind him. "We need to send a report up. Need to find a nice space where we won't be discovered to send the datapacket."

"Ummm, here?"

Barricade shook his head. "Cell tower interference." Place was quiet enough—most of this part of New Jersey was—but the fraggin' signal towers scattered the encryption. Sort of like sending a nice 'hi here we are' flag to any eavesdropping Autobots. And while Barricade hated being bored, he hated getting unpleasant and ambushy type surprises from Autobots.

Blackout considered. "Right. I can fly us to a clearer area."

Barricade squirmed, trying to hide his excitement. What? Shut up. Riding in a copter? Awesome. "That would, uh…be nice."

"You will never fraggin' tell anyone about this." A series of thunks overhead as Blackout spread his rotors into flight position.

Barricade nodded, trying to brace his limbs as he heard the powerful engine begin to spin up, the rotors starting to slice through the air, completely failing to suppress his delighted grin.

The flight was shorter than Barricade would have wanted, but…that was probably an obvious statement. There was something immensely hot about the power of the engine to pull this mass off the ground, to steer it with such effortless precision. It was…really hot. Yeah. Incoherently hot.

And now, it was over: Blackout rolled open his door again, pointedly. "Check out here." Barricade reluctantly poured himself out of the cabin. The rain had stopped, the only sound late drops dripping off the bare, dead branches. His feet squished in the sodden leaves, a thick, clammy carpet, water seeping into his armor.

Focus: he checked with his boosted comm. Yeah, this would do. "What's our local geographical location?" Why check himself when Blackout already had the nav scan?

"Still in 'New Jersey'—not far from the military base I raided."

"Doesn't look very military here." Looked pretty fraggin' desolate. Just leaves and the bald frames of trees melding into the darkness of the night. Not that Barricade was complaining: ambushy fun times from armed humans also wasn't high on his fun list. Especially during a low-profile recon mission. Kind of a stark sign of mission failure there.

"We're nowhere near the base itself. Local maps call this 'Pine Barrens'."

"Well, they got the 'barren' part down." The pine, not quite as much, though the reek of wet conifer hung heavily in the air, mixed in the general wet half-rotted leafiness. Urgh. Two things Barricade hated: water and leafiness. He prepped the datapacket for burst transfer, pausing to layer on a pile of encryptions. Behind him, Blackout transformed, showily rolling his shoulders, twisting his waist joint, as though he'd been cramped in his vehicle mode. Well, it always was a bit of an adjustment to have parts suddenly be able to move.

"Hey, you hear something?" Blackout whispered, abruptly.

"You mean beyond all that racket you just made?" Barricade glanced over, his lower optics dimmed, still engaged in the task of layering on encryption and transmission codes.

"Yeah," Blackout's optics scanned a half-perimeter.

A noise. Blackout jumped, rotors flaring in an aggression display. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-hoooooo, and then a rushing rustle.

Barricade snorted. "Fraggin' OWL. Indigenous nocturnal predator." Huh. Seems the copter's indigenous knowledge was pretty fraggin' thin. As if Barricade couldn't have guessed that from the collection of random junk.

"Yeah, whatever. I wasn't scared." Blackout's rotors thinned again, his optics narrowing.

"Riiiiiight," Barricade retorted. "Fraidycopter."

"Am not!" Blackout was irate. "I'm ten times the warrior you are."

"In mass maybe," Barricade snapped.

"Yeah? Come a little closer and say that again."

Barricade's upper set of optics rolled. "Seriously? I got a job to do, copter." He went back to prepping his packet. "Don't distract me by freaking out over fraggin' nature, this time?"

Blackout glared.

A strange noise split the air, starting like some low rumbling growl, but climbing up in volume and pitch, ending in some audio-ringing wavering shriek.

"Yeah, okay," Barricade said, softly, dropping into a crouch. "That, I heard."

"What the frag is it?"

"How should I know?"

Blackout grabbed his tailrotor, optics keen. "You shouldn't have made fun of my attempt to do research, then."

Barricade snapped derisively, "Seriously? You think this is some skeleton?"

"How do YOU know what kinda noise they make?"

"They don't make any noise, because they don't slaggin' exist!"

Blackout's retort to Barricade's retort was cut short by another of the insane-sounding, circuit-shorting screeches. This time, from their left. They whirled.

"It's moving," Blackout said.

"Or, there's more than one of it. Them. Whatever."

"You don't know what it is, and you still try to tell me it sure isn't a skeleton thing." Blackout growled.

Barricade made a frustrated sound. "It's not a skeleton. They don't even have vocal cords, for frag's sake, which is how squishies make noise." They froze, a moment of wariness. Audio and video keenly tuning, running up and down through channels.

A rustle among the trees, bare branches clashing together like bones. "It's getting closer," Blackout said, readjusting his grip on his tailrotor.

"Just the wind," Barricade murmured, half-heartedly. Barricade shifted uneasily, half-turning, so that he and Blackout were guarding each other's backs.

"Wind, my rusted tailrotor." Blackout scanned the area overhead. The rustling continued. "Maybe we should fly out of here. Find another place for the transmission."

Barricade had been about to suggest, you know, that very thing, except the copter's saying it first set him on edge. That and he'd just done a slow backpedal, until his window-wings bumped against a dangling rotor. Which made him feel like a coward AND a klutz. "Frag. It's something on a stinking disgusting mudball. Nothing here's that scary."

"Except all those squishies. You know, the ones who just about offlined me, offlined Megatron?"

Oh, that was helpful. Thanks, Blackout. Barricade growled. "Not afraid of it. They're more afraid of you than you are of them." He'd heard that somewhere. And it made sense. Or something.

"Uhhh, whatever, Barricade." Blackout turned, his rotors clanging into Barricade. One arm pointed over Barricade's head. "LOOK OVER THERE," Blackout whispered. "Holy frag!"

Barricade's optics snapped to what Blackout was pointing at—to see a pair of orangey lights glowing at them.

"Thos aren't Autobot optics," Blackout said, "So what are they?"

"'S a deer."

"In the fraggin' TREE?"

Okay, Barricade hadn't heard of magical tree-climbing deer, but whatever. "One of Soundwave's drones?"

"Already ran a comm ping. Not a mech."

The shriek split the air again. Blackout spun on his tailrotor, the blades whistling. "Wish the fraggin' thing would attack already," he muttered. The orange lights flickered—blinked—in a mass of black, somehow darker than the night around it.

Well, no argument there. Barricade flung out his own spoke weapon, crouching next to Blackout.

"Hey!" Barricade shouted. "Go away!"

"Go…away?" Blackout sounded…perplexed. "That's the best you can come up with?" He sounded a bit disappointed.

Yeah, well Barricade was a bit disappointed himself. He prided himself in snazzy battlefield repartee. But frag, this thing wasn't giving him much to work with. "Cram it, copter."

The orange glows dipped, then swooped, then suddenly rushed toward them, growing larger, the horrible screech swelling, racing toward them, blasting their audio. Heat hit them, like a wall, hard and hot enough to sizzle the wet leaves, burst the water on Barricade's legs into billows of steam.

Blackout growled, his rotorweapon slashing confidently through the air and…right through the black shape. Which blasted right through him.

Blackout gurgled, wobbling back, and then forward, dropping to one knee, his arched greave slamming into the ground.

"Blackout!" Barricade flicked his weapon back into its housing, turning to the downed copter. Blackout's optics flickered, dim, unsteady, his hands a little shaky. "Frag. What happened?"

"Don't know…," Blackout's voice was weak and thready. "Flew right through me?"

"What it looked like, yeah." Barricade ran his talons over the broad bell of the copter's chassis. It was warm—hot—to the touch, steam venting into the air with soft, frightened hisses. Frag. What was that thing? "You…okay?"

Blackout blinked slowly. "Y-yeah. Just a bit, you know…."

"Freaky?"

Their optics met in a mutual discomfort. Both wanting to disavow what they'd just seen, but unable to. Barricade could still feel the strange heat seeping from Blackout's armor. "Yeah, freaky," Blackout mumbled. "I'm okay." His head craned. "Where'd the fraggin' thing go?"

Barricade leaned around the copter's mass, both of them scanning. "Can't find it," Barricade said, and a hint of worry crept into his voice.

"Me neither." Blackout pushed back up to both feet, rotors pinned to a thin line down his back. "Go on and send the databurst."

"Yeah, you know what?" Barricade said. "Don't think we've really found anything we got to send, you know, like right now. It can keep."

A shuddering vent from the larger mech. "Yeah. Let's, uh…get out of here."

"We could…maybe go to that Cape Fear place?" Barricade offered. You know, so it didn't look too badly like they were wussing out. Even though they both totally were.

Blackout folded himself down, the plates locking into his copter mode with clingy clicks. "Uhhh, think I've had enough of that stuff. Let's just…fly until sunrise, maybe?"

A mocking, giggling shriek behind them, nearly choking with dark mockery. Barricade flung himself into Blackout's cargo hold, ducking under rotors that were already spinning up. He wasn't thinking of the thrill of a copter ride this time. Just putting as much distance between that…whatever it was, as possible. He pushed the crate, spilling over with more comic books, as far away from him as he could with one foot. "Yeah. Sounds good to me."


End file.
